Author: martin fierz
Date: 01:10:18 08/08/04
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On August 07, 2004 at 20:21:49, Ed Trice wrote: >How much success has Dropout Expansion [Thomas Lincke] had in the domain of >chess? Has any opening theory been overturned as a result of this? > >Are there any "Dropout Expansion Junkies" out there who have applied the >technique to chess who might be willing to share their experiences? hi ed, as you probably know, i know tom, and i looked at his chess book once when he was still working on it. at that time, it was pretty much no good at all. the problem with chess is that you have many moves which are clearly absurd, but which an engine will not rate as such - e.g. 1.h3 is not a horrible move at all, but still nothing you would want to try... therefore, the drop-out-expander for chess has to be extremely selective in order not to expand such moves, which then in turn means that it misses all kinds of other things. an example: i remember we once thought it was a good idea to look at a dragon variation like so: 1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 d6 3. d4 cxd4 4. Nxd4 Nf6 5. Nc3 g6 6. Be3 Bg7 7. f3 O-O 8. Qd2 Nc6 9. Bc4 Bd7 10. Bb3 Rc8 11. O-O-O Ne5 12. h4 Nc4 13. Bxc4 Rxc4 and either here, or 14. h5 Nxh5 here we started the expander, which found 15. g4 Nf6 so far so good, a very well known dragon position: [D] 3q1rk1/pp1bppbp/3p1np1/8/2rNP1P1/2N1BP2/PPP4Q/2KR3R b - - 0 16 and now the main line went 16. Qh2? h5? and so on - the crafty version used (i think 16.something) had no clue that after 16. Qh2? Rxc3! black is fine. it scored this as about -1 for black, and because of the narrow limits on the book expander, it never searched this line further... as i see, my fritz 7 is better at this position, so of course it also depends on how good your engine is. for a game like checkers it works very well, because there really many moves simply lose instantly and you can focus on the good moves. for chess this is not true. i know tom continued his book expansion until he had a couple of million moves (4 million IIRC), but i don't know whether it ever was any good! cheers martin
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